PHILADELPHIA—The Pittsburgh Penguins came across the state of Pennsylvania looking to get back into their series with the Flyers after back-to-back home losses to open the best-of-seven first-round clash. They needed the best effort from their best players. They needed to keep a sharp mental edge. They needed their leaders to lead.

What the Penguins got was a full-scale flop in which they squandered a third consecutive early lead, lost their composure to the tune of 89 of the game’s 158 penalty minutes and saw their captain, Sidney Crosby, take more penalties than shots on goal.

Losers by an 8-4 score in Game 3 on Sunday afternoon, the Penguins are on the brink of elimination, one more loss from a much longer than expected summer vacation. There is plenty of blame to spread around, but a lot of it lies with Crosby, the captain for whom leading by example should mean playing like the best player in the world, not acting like a spoiled child.

The Penguins already had let their only lead of the day slip away, and were down 3-1 when Crosby sent a shot wide of the Flyers’ net. Ilya Bryzgalov covered the puck for a stoppage, but Crosby took an extra hack at it, sparking a shoving match in a game that already had featured seven penalties.

During the scrum, Philadelphia winger Jakub Voracek lost his glove. When he went to pick it up as things were settling down, it skittered away from him. A slippery, sweat-soaked mitt on a frictionless surface—those things can happen. Especially if they’re helped along.

“His glove was near me,” Crosby said. “He went to pick it up, and I pushed it.”

Why would Crosby do something like that?

“I don’t like him,” Crosby said.

Why not?

“Because I don’t like him.”

Oh, OK, then. To be fair, Crosby added that he doesn’t like anyone on the Flyers, so it wasn’t just out of spite for Voracek that he decided to keep stirring the pot after the mess that he had created appeared to fizzle out. It was out of distaste for the Flyers.

The result was a new flare of chaos. Crosby squared off with Flyers defenseman Kimmo Timonen, but they wound up in separate fights—Crosby against fellow concussion victim Claude Giroux, while Timonen and Kris Letang were both ejected after they fought.

It would be easier to brush off Crosby’s instigation had he not reignited another skirmish with 4:42 left in the game, when the Flyers were up 7-4 and the verdict was sealed. The referees had just finished sorting out a melee, and the penalties were being announced to the crowd when more nastiness broke out in front of the Penguins’ bench, with Crosby right in the middle of it, pushing and shoving with Scott Hartnell. Because there is no way that Crosby, with his concussion history, would ever fight Hartnell, that duty fell to Craig Adams, who wound up with an instigator penalty tacked on to his fighting major as a result.

That was twice that Crosby started fights he could not finish, and that was the example by which he led the Penguins deeper into the abyss.

Crosby will turn 25 in August. He already has been a Stanley Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, scoring champion and MVP of the NHL. Achievements, however, do not equal maturity, and Crosby only dug a deeper hole for his reputation as he continued to talk about what he did.

“Guys are emotional, and there’s a lot of stuff going on out there,” he said. “There’s no reason to explain. I don’t have to sit here and say why I pushed a glove away. They’re doing a lot of things out there, too, and you know what? We don’t like each other. Was I going to sit there and pick up his glove for him? What was I supposed to do?”

The suggestion was made that Crosby could have skated away, let Voracek pick up his glove and be done with it.

“Skate away?” he said, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. “Well, I didn’t that time.”

Crosby had to get the extra shot in. The Penguins followed his lead. Two minutes after the glove-swatting incident, Philadelphia winger Brayden Schenn clobbered Pittsburgh defenseman Paul Martin, resulting in a charging minor. Instead of a power play, though, the Penguins wound up shorthanded because Arron Asham skated over to Schenn and cross-checked him in the throat. Then, when Schenn was down on the ice, Asham delivered a punch to his head, and was ejected from the game.

Nobody is saying that Crosby has to be a saint on skates, but there is an expected level of sportsmanship that comes with his position as the captain of an NHL team and the face of the league. Crosby did not meet those expectations on Sunday, and his team is on the brink of failing to meet its expectations of winning the Stanley Cup.